Email Spam and Virus Protection

Rackspace estimates that over 90% of all email traffic is spam, although most spam never makes it to the inbox. Millions of dollars in business productivity and additional infrastructure expenses are often lost due to spam. To make matters worse, email is being used to ‘phish’ sensitive and valuable information from companies and trick people into transferring money. To defend against email spam and phishing, you must stay one step ahead of the evolving threat.

How Rackspace Email Helps You Combat Spam and Viruses

Our spam and virus filtering is handled in two stages: blocked email, and filtered email. Blocked email ensures you never see those messages in your mailbox. If we can’t block it, email filtering is used to identify spam and put it in your spam folder.

Blocked Email

Rackspace Email uses several industry best practice techniques to block email spam coming from known disreputable sources. This comprises email we know, with a high degree of certainty, is not from a legitimate service. This covers everything from compromised servers to ‘spam cannon’ services that send unsolicited spam across the internet. These techniques include the use of IP block lists provided by reputable services well known throughout the email industry, as well as blocking emails with attachment types known to exploit end-user computers.

Filtered Email

If mail passes the blocked email checks, we apply advanced content filtering to verify whether it is considered spam. Content filtering combines many techniques to analyze email structure and content, and create key indicators that identify patterns in email. These indicators are combined with industry-wide feedback from email providers across the internet about reported spam, phishing, and viruses. The end result is an accurate, adaptive, and evolving content filtering system that is highly effective at removing spam.